Tariq Ali's Blog, page 31

'Passions of another Pakistan' – The Independent on Night of the Golden Butterfly

Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Aamer Hussein for The Independent, May 28, 2010

Naughty Lateef, a Pakistani housewife who sleeps with powerful men, is "masquerading as a wronged Muslim woman, describing her oppression in lavish detail" in a book of kiss-and-tell memoirs disguised as a denunciation of Muslim norms.

On a French TV show, she finds herself in opposition to a "hijab-clad Maghrebin Frenchwoman". Unexpectedly Yusufa, who wears the hijab as a "gesture of defiance", wins the r...

The Scotsman reviews Night of the Golden Butterfly

Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Tom Adair for The Scotsman, May 23, 2010

Reminiscent of John Updike's Rabbit at Rest—the final volume of his Rabbit quartet—there's a mighty, resounding thwack of satisfaction for the reader at the conclusion of Tariq Ali's ambitious Night of the Golden Butterfly. Both books conclude with a sense of finality mingled with loss—the death of a larger-than-life leading character has just happened—yet something adheres.

For Ali winds up his audacious...

Michael Arditti on Night of the Golden Butterfly for the Daily Mail

Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Michael Arditti for the Daily Mail, May 21, 2010

Tariq Ali may still be best known as a 1960s political firebrand but, in latter years, he has reinvented himself as a novelist of distinction. Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth volume of his Islam Quintet. Having traced the tortuous relations between the Muslim world and the West in key historical eras, he now takes on the fraught task of tackling it in the present day.

Switching between...

'Kentucky Fried Education: The Market Assault on Reason'

'Kentucky Fried Education: The Market Assault on Reason', Tariq Ali speaks out against the closure of the Middlesex Philosophy Department, May 15, 2010

Listen to the speech

'The People of Greece Are Fighting for the Whole of Europe'

'The People of Greece Are Fighting for the Whole of Europe', an interview with Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot for Democracy Now!, May 11, 2010

'A life in writing: Tariq Ali'

Tariq Ali profiled by James Campbell for the Guardian to celebrate the launch of Night of the Golden Butterfly, May 8, 2010

In photographs and news footage of political demonstrations of the 1960s, Tariq Ali is unmistakeable: the thick black hair and thatchy moustache; the clenched fist and characteristic surge to the foreground amid a sea of fair faces. Almost immediately on coming down from Oxford in 1966, Ali began to agitate for a workers' uprising—not just in Britain but across the...

'The heretic and the holy: Tariq Ali's histories of Islam'

The Islam Quintet reviewed by Robyn Creswell for The National, May 7, 2010

"I've let my pen run away with me and preached my heresies for too long," Tariq Ali once wrote, in an essay called Letter to a Young Muslim. "I doubt that I will change, but I hope you will." Ali is indeed a kind of professional, or inveterate heretic, a writer who has made a career of dissenting from every kind of orthodoxy. But to call it a career suggests a rather solemn enterprise, whereas Ali's writings are...

'Poet of the Punjab' – Fatima Bhutto reviews Night of the Golden Butterfly

Night of the Golden Butterfly reviewed by Fatima Bhutto for the New Statesman, April 23, 2010

If Pakistan is a land of untold stories, whispered conspiracy theories and closed-door mutinies, then thank heavens for Tariq Ali, whose access to its innermost secret chambers has made him the country's finest historian and critic.

Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth and final volume of Ali's Islam quintet. His intricate historical novels have spanned the Moors in Spain, the Ottoman empire...

Night of the Golden Butterfly

Published by Verso, 2010

The final volume in Tariq Ali's acclaimed cycle of historical novels, The Islam Quintet

[image error]Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali's much lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages, that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to...

Obama at War: The Brooklyn Rail interviews Tariq Ali

An interview with Tariq Ali by Theodore Hamm and Christian Parenti for The Brooklyn Rail, April 9, 2010

Rail: What do you make of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recent observation that an "amazing" number of innocent Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S. forces? That fact is not surprising—but shouldn't such high-level acknowledgment of it provoke real opposition to the war?

Tariq Ali: It should but it won't because North American and European citizens (the latter in large majorities) who...